by Finley Aaron
DNA extracted in the tank, isolated in the centrifuge, pumped into the bodies via marinating holding tanks.
This Wexler guy scares me.
While we’re on the subject of things that freak me out, the wind is starting to howl. A gust of it nearly knocks me off my perch, and I have to cling to the frame of the skylight to keep my footing. Snow swirls down from the flickering clouds, and a distant rumble speaks eerily of impending danger.
The storm is building. Probably on lower elevations, it’s a thunderstorm. Up here, where precipitation falls as snow, not rain, it’s still a thunderstorm, albeit an unnatural one. I’ve heard of thunder snow. I’ve just never experienced it before, certainly not while clinging to a rooftop alongside a bunch of gargoyle figures and lightning rods.
I peer through the swirling white toward the nearest mountains and locate Rilla, a shimmer of robin’s egg blue on a ledge of the nearest peak. Though I fully expect her to be giving me a look that says let’s get out of here, her attention is focused to the south.
What’s so interesting over there?
I look. At first I only see swirling snow. But then a shadow moves, flying toward the castle, growing more distinct the closer it gets.
It’s Ion, in silvery-green dragon form, with Eudora on his back.
My heart does a sort of flipping thing when I see him—a cross between excitement and fear. Does he have any idea what he’s flying into?
Like so many dragon castles, this one has broad balconies perfect for taking off and landing. Eudora points Ion toward one in particular, and he lands there, changing into human form.
He looks so cold.
I shuffle closer to a gargoyle figure and peer over the carved creature’s shoulder. I’m mostly hidden here, not that anyone’s looking my way. Ion and Eudora are not more than fifty feet from me, but the way this wing juts out from the side of the main building, I’m back a ways from them, tucked almost out of sight.
As promised, Ion didn’t bring my dad with him. I scan the mountains for a glimpse of my father’s sapphire-blue eyes or scales, but I can’t see him anywhere in the swirling snow. Is he out there? Is he safe?
In this snow, he could be fairly close by and I still wouldn’t be able to see him.
A man steps out of the castle onto the balcony to meet Ion and Eudora. He’s wearing a dark cape which billows in the wind. I can’t see his face from this angle, but his hair is dark brown and thick, tufting where the wind grasps it.
“What is this?” The man’s voice is loud, and the wind carries his words my way.
“A peace offering.” Eudora’s voice is softer, but I think I heard her correctly. Is this her ruse to get inside? Pretend to come in peace?
“He’s a male. What am I going to do with a male?”
Eudora says something in response. I can’t quite catch it all, but I’m pretty sure I hear the words, “the females will follow.”
Whatever she said, Ion gives her a look that’s distinctly…betrayed.
I shiver, partly because it’s cold, and partly because I wonder what kind of ruse this is, or who Eudora is really tricking here. Whose side is she on? Were we foolish to trust her as much as we did?
Does Hans Wexler want female dragons?
Is this a trap?
I glance back in Rilla’s direction. She’s watching the scene unfold on the balcony, but there’s no way she can hear Hans and Eudora from where she’s perched. Is she in danger?
Even if she is, I have no way of warning her—not without further endangering both of us.
“He’d like to see the nursery,” Eudora’s words are whipped by the wind. I’m nearly certain she said more than what I heard, but I couldn’t make it out. I don’t even know if I heard the part I heard correctly.
Nursery? What kind of nursery? Is that why he needs females?
Wexler leads Ion and Eudora inside.
Now’s my chance to escape, to wave Rilla over so we can both fly away to safety, while Hans and everybody else are inside where they can’t see us.
Except now is the absolute worst time to leave, because I have no idea what’s going on.
Is Eudora lying to Hans to get inside? Or is Eudora working with Hans? I wouldn’t be too surprised if everything she said at the dinner table the other day was one long, twisted lie, knitted to just enough truth to get us to believe it.
But it raises another question, and this one hits me like a punch in the gut.
Is Ion working with Eudora…and Hans?
My mother’s doubt works its way up from wherever I’d buried it. Can Ion be trusted?
Did Ion conspire with Hans and Eudora to lure me here?
I shake off the questions. Of course not. Ion specifically tried to keep me from following him. He tried to leave me at home.
The females will follow.
Did I even hear Eudora correctly? What are they doing inside?
Noises echo up from below my feet. I shuffle back toward the skylight and crouch down to see inside, just as a door closes beneath me with a creaking boom. Lights flicker on, highlighting the creepiness of the room below.
“This is the nursery.” That’s Hans Wexler speaking, for sure, though his voice echoes differently in the enclosed space, without the wind. “At standard output, we produce two dozen soldiers every eighteen hours.”
Soldiers. Right. An army of undead mutant cyborg dragon killers. But if you call them soldiers, they sound heroic.
Raised in a nursery, no less. How cuddly.
So much more appealing than the Frankenstein laboratory below me.
And these “soldiers” (quotes because I’m using it ironically, in case you weren’t sure) are the same creatures who took away my ability to assume dragon form. They nearly killed me.
If I knew how to do it, I’d have destroyed them already.
“How does the operation work?” Ion asks, his voice crisp and clear, not even shaking.
Wexler launches into this detailed explanation with a bunch of technical jargon I don’t really understand, and various German and French phrases, probably to make him sound smart. It’s rather tricky to follow, but basically, if I’m correctly catching the gist of it, the whole thing works much like I thought it did. Tank of roaches, centrifuge to isolate the desired DNA strands, which are then injected into the corpses in the tanks.
Injected.
When Hans explains this part, he flips big switches on a panel, and metal arms spring up from the sides of the tanks, needle-tipped syringes poised for injection.
“We are close enough to the time for the next dose. Watch.” Hans pulls a big lever, and the hands swing down, plunging their needles into the corpses in the tanks, which lurch and twitch in response.
Remember how I said I thought I was going to puke earlier?
Now I really think I’m going to puke. Except I can’t, or it will land in the room below me and give away that I’m here.
I swallow back the acid that rose in my throat.
So gross.
The metal arms retract and the corpses stop twitching.
“Very impressive.” Ion speaks again. “So, the centrifuge is the heart of the operation?”
“You could call it that.” Hans launches into another techno-jargon filled description of the tubes and pipes and the role they play, and how long it all took to build, and which parts are the most difficult to replace. The pipes and tubes are important. The tanks are important. The centrifuge, however?
It’s made with rare elements. Eudora built it with the help of some people who aren’t even alive anymore.
The centrifuge is pretty much irreplaceable.
I’m listening closely, but at the same time I’m trying to decide what to do.
If the centrifuge is the heart, I could knock it out from here if I had a bow and arrow. I don’t, though. Just like with the bear in the forest, I’ll have to make do with what I have.
The bear almost killed me, though.
Let’s not th
ink too long about that.
No, if I learned anything from my adventure with the bear, it’s that I shouldn’t try to throw my sword like a javelin. The knives at my ankles are much better suited to that purpose.
So, in theory, I could knock out the centrifuge—and by extension, the yagi operation—with one perfect knife toss.
My knife-throwing skills aside (I’m not bad, but I don’t know that I’m ready to bet my life on it) there’s just one problem with that plan.
Yes, we came here to destroy the yagi operation, but the reason we came here to destroy the yagi operation, was because my parents are trying to determine whether Ion can be trusted. If he destroys the yagi operation, we’ll know he’s on our side.
If not, well, there’s an unfortunate chance he may have been in league with Eudora all along, and this whole trip was a complicated scheme to lure me and possibly Rilla, and maybe even my mom and the other female dragons in our extended family, to come here. In which case, their plan is already working.
I don’t want Ion to be in league with Eudora. I want to believe he’s on our side. In fact, in my heart, I believe I can trust him. Unfortunately, my heart has been known to lead me into trouble, so maybe I should listen to my head for once.
Besides which, my parents won’t believe he’s on our side unless he fulfills his quest.
Until Ion makes some move to destroy what’s in the room below me, I shouldn’t trust him. Not with my life.
Hans has been rattling on, mostly in English with the occasional German or French phrase, so it’s been difficult to follow, but now he chuckles in a way that makes my spine crawl, and points upward.
I duck back out of sight. My heart stopped for a second, but I don’t think Hans was pointing to me. He’s down there talking about Donder and Blitzen, which I’m pretty sure are the names of two of Santa’s reindeer, which were named for the German words for…thunder and lightning.
The lightning rod farthest from me crackles with white lightening, and a boom echoes above my head, causing the air and everything around me to tremble.
Donder and Blitzen, indeed.
My favorite reindeer was Vixen.
I clutch the skylight frame and peek into the room below. Hans is chuckling and talking in an animated voice. He is way too happy.
Considering he’s our enemy, the fact that he’s happy is not a good sign.
Another bolt of lightning tickles the far lightning rod, sending white sparks shooting down its length. This time, I see similar arcs of light sparking in the room below, around the centrifuge, which is spinning far faster than before.
Piecing together what I heard of Wexler’s explanation, the lightning must be the power source that extracts the DNA from the cockroaches, or something like that. Anyway, Wexler’s thrilled about the storm.
Eudora looks pleased.
Ion, however, is pale. Is that a good sign? Maybe it’s a strong clue he’s not working with the two mad scientists. But at the same time, it’s not a promising indication of his likelihood to make it out of the laboratory alive.
I grab the knife at my ankle. One good toss, and I could end this.
But then what? My parents won’t know for sure Ion is on our side.
I won’t know for sure.
Reluctantly, I stay my hand.
Come on, Ion, give me some sign that you’re on my side. Please.
Hans Wexler is still laughing that creepy laugh, and another boom of thunder, this one even closer, threatens to topple me from my perch. Happily, almost giddily, Hans crosses the room to another set of levers, these so large he has to throw his weight into them to get them to move.
For a second, I don’t understand what he’s up to. I’m mostly worried about the lightning snapping too close to me, and the thunder that’s shaking the whole mountain.
But then the last row of coffin-like tanks, the one with the most finished yagi, starts to slosh and splash.
It takes me a minute to realize what’s happening. Hydraulic lifts inside each tank push up the bodies, raising the yagi out of the water, tipping them headfirst out into the air and standing them upright on unsteady feet.
It’s a row of streaming-wet, brand-new yagi. Twenty four of them. For a moment, they stand still like models in a showroom.
Then the lightning crackles again, and they start to move.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The yagi lumber to life, staggering forth with stiff, unsteady movements. If this was some low-budget horror flick, I might be laughing at their ungainly attempts to walk. Unfortunately, I know what these creatures are capable of. They appearing to be growing more agile with every step.
Not that I’m even watching them anymore. Hans has grabbed an enormously thick chain that’s dangling from the ceiling. I can’t see the rest of it since it’s directly underneath me somewhere, but from the sound of it, the chain is attached to some kind of metal mechanism somewhere on the ceiling.
At the other end is a heavy-duty clamp thing.
Ion’s face goes even paler; an almost blue, ghostly white.
That clamp thing? I think it’s shackles.
Ion looks from the shackles to Hans to Eudora, and I realize the scene below me has gone from bad to worse. Ion’s not wearing any weapons—none at all, that I can see. What did Eudora tell him, to convince him he’d be okay going in like that?
Then again, I went to Ion’s place without any swords, so maybe she didn’t have to say much to convince him.
At least I have swords now.
Ion glances around the room again, and seems to take everything in with one sweeping glance. The lightning flickering between the roach tank and the centrifuge. The tanks—which are doing this freakish thing, where the second row has dumped its bodies into the tank in front of it, and the row behind that is dumping its bodies into the newly-emptied second row, and so on, I’m sure, until all the semi-yagi have been moved up a row.
Then there are the staggering yagi, and Eudora, who’s scampered around behind Hans like some scared, crouching bunny.
And Hans Wexler himself, swinging the shackles around like a lasso, laughing in a way that might ruin laughter for me forever.
Ion takes this all in with one sweeping glance, and then he changes into a dragon, bounding above the yagi as they stagger toward him.
Ion leaps toward the centrifuge, talons outstretched. For one relieved instant, I’m sure he’s going to shred it and prove his allegiance to me and to my family while simultaneously becoming the greatest hero of modern dragons.
But before he’s quite halfway there, Hans lets the shackles fly. They slap into Ion’s left leg and snap closed around his ankle.
Wexler’s laughter escalates. He’s obviously pleased with himself, and tugs on the chain like a fisherman reeling in a trophy catch. His face is turned upward now, and for the first time, I get a decent look at his face.
For all his evilness, he’s classically handsome, in a sort of Old Hollywood leading actor sort of way. I can see how Eudora could have fallen for him years ago. They probably made a beautiful couple, with her screen star good looks.
At the other end of Wexler’s line, Ion’s leg shrivels back to human size.
The rest of his body follows.
It’s the magnetism, isn’t it? It doesn’t just keep a dragons from assuming dragon form—it actually forces them back into human shape.
As soon as his face is human, Ion asks, “What are you doing?”
“I could ask the same of you, not that it matters any more what you thought you were going to do. You’ve got one choice before you. Either cooperate and come with me, or fight my soldiers.”
A blast of thunder rattles the skylight panes all around me, as though to punctuate the dreadfulness of either choice.
Ion doesn’t hesitate. “I’ll take my chances with your soldiers.”
“Are you sure? That’s really not the best choice.” Hans sounds disappointed.
“I’m sure.”
&
nbsp; “Suit yourself.” Wexler steps back against the wall, but doesn’t leave the room.
I watch, hoping he’ll leave and give me an opportunity to jump down there and rescue Ion, and maybe even destroy the centrifuge while we make our escape. But Wexler obviously wants to stick around for the show. Which means if I try to help Ion, I’m sure to be discovered.
But what other choice is there? Ion tried to shred the centrifuge. That means he’s on my side. Didn’t he already tell me he was?
I will destroy the yagi, or die trying.
Why do I get the terrible feeling it’s going to be the latter of those two options?
The yagi stagger toward Ion. Having arrived in dragon form with no weapons on his back, he has nothing to work with. He’s completely defenseless, clad only in his shorts.
Well, maybe not completely defenseless. As the first of the yagi come at him, Ion reaches down and picks up the heavy chain that dangles from his leg. He whips the solid metal at the creatures.
Two fall, their heads dented.
A third stumbles over his fallen comrades, but quickly rights himself.
Okay, two down, twenty-two to go. Not great odds, but it’s something.
I’m frantically trying to think what I could possibly do to help that wouldn’t end up making matters worse. If I drop through this skylight, I’ve got to have a solid plan for getting back out again. Because if I don’t come out within a reasonable length of time, Rilla might try to come in after me.
I look back through the swirling snow at the ledge where my sister is perched. I can’t see her face too clearly on account of the blasting precipitation all around, but between blasts of snow I see enough to know she looks concerned.
I have no way of sending her a message, other than to wave my arms and tell her to come pick me up.
That’s the last message I want to send, unless I figure out a way to get Ion out of the laboratory. I keep my arms still.
More yagi lumber toward Ion. He whips the chain again and again. Three more fall.
“Oh, you want to play it that way, do you?” Hans doesn’t sound so amused any more. “We’ll see how you like this.” He slinks along the wall toward a set of levers, and throws his weight into one, pulling it slowly down.